iBrothers likes it’s mobile broadband – no, we REALLY like our mobile broadband. It’s there when we are stuck in traffic and need directions, when we are looking for a decent coffee in an unknown area, conducting emergency remote support on the road, enabling us to share photos instantly at the birth of our children … So when we hear about improvements to speed and performance being offered from Mobile Broadband, you know we are going to be all over it.

Enter Bigpond’s latest offering, the Ultimate Mobile Broadband WI-FI. Using Telstra’s next G network, the device promises download speeds up to 20Mbps and upload speeds up to 3Mbps. These speeds are a considerable jump from the current offerings of any other carrier. The modem itself is a Sierra Aircard 753S and while the website claims theoretical speeds up to 42Mbps, Telstra is stating the speeds to be around half that. The unit supports frequencies of UMTS 850/1900/2100 MHz, comes with wireless N connectivity and an internal GPS. More information can be found in the links at the end of this review. Read more

At iBrothers, we have generally stuck with Telstra when it comes to both mobile phone coverage as well as mobile broadband. The reason for this is that Telstra’s Next G network is supposedly the best of all providers for speed as well as coverage. Of late however, we have been noticing that, at times, the speeds we were getting from Telstra seemed to be slower. Coupled with anecdotal evidence from customers and family of similar issues, we decided it was time to conduct some actual real world tests of our own. Read more